He walked back to his chair more slowly than he had when he met them, and she put his tea within reach.
‘Are you sure you’re OK? We could call your doctor.’
‘I’m fine. I’m just a bit shaky. I’m shocked that anyone could suspect Alistair Chorleigh of hurting anyone now. The last time I saw him he was too drunk to catch the bus home, so I gave him a lift. It must be a year ago now. He’s a sick man, he couldn’t manage the walk from the pub.’
Sage nodded. ‘Do you remember seeing Alistair after Lara Black went missing?’
The old man took a bite of biscuit and chewed before answering. ‘I think he dropped out of college but I don’t remember him ever having a job. He used to help my wife in the garden but she said he was moody, depressed. Then he started working for his father and we hardly saw him again. He came to Isabel’s funeral four years ago. He made a big fuss of the dogs we had then.’ There was a little more colour in his face now. ‘I’m down to one, now.’
Felix leaned forward. ‘Did you ever think either man was capable of cruelty to an animal?’
‘Alistair, no.’ The old man took a deep breath. ‘Around that time we had some animals injured in the forest. Horses and cattle were being mutilated, stabbed; I attended a few myself. Had to put a couple of children’s ponies down, very sad. George Chorleigh was loud in condemnation of the police, of their inability to catch the person responsible.’
Sage nodded. ‘We’re looking into it, to see if there’s any connection. But neither of his horses were affected?’
‘No, no. He built a proper stable for them – he just had a field shelter before and he used to stable them up at Oak Farm in the winter. He installed a proper lock, alarm, everything.’ He wrapped his fingers around the cup. ‘The horses weren’t sold on, then?’
Felix sat back. ‘I’m sorry. We can’t talk about an ongoing investigation. Let us know if you remember anything else. The police will send someone round to take your statement.’ His voice was mild but he stared directly at the old man. ‘I must emphasise that it’s important to stick to the truth, not protect anyone.’
The vet turned to Sage. ‘I still don’t see how I can help.’
She leaned forward. ‘Do you remember a product called “Equicura”?’
He raised an eyebrow. ‘We used it for years. We only went over to a new product because it had such a short shelf life. We were always chucking old stock out. A lot of the wormers were like it back then.’ He stroked the dog’s ears. ‘We went over to Ovasicure around 1992, I think.’
‘And how long did Equicura last, would you say?’ Sage said.
He shrugged. ‘Under a year, certainly. My wife used to complain we got boxes with short dates on, I recall. She worked as a receptionist for us. My daughter was one of the vets, it was a real family business.’
Sage smiled at him. ‘That’s useful, thank you. And if Alistair Chorleigh didn’t do anything wrong, I’m sure we’ll prove that, clear his name.’
‘I suppose the police will be interviewing him if she was found in his garden.’ When neither answered, he sighed. ‘You know what a scapegoat is? That’s what Alistair has always been. A scapegoat.’
12
‘Some news from ancient history should astonish our readers, as a tomb from the Bronze Age has been excavated by students from the University of Oxford. Mr Peter Chorleigh and his colleague Mr Edwin Masters have already found what they believe to be a funerary urn, deep inside the mysterious tumuli in the gardens of the house in Fairfield.’
New Forest Gazette, 1st July 1913 Newspaper clipping pasted into the journal of Edwin Masters
The first morning of July was dull and overcast, but we walked with renewed enthusiasm to the dig. An article was in the local Gazette, the reporter had visited us the previous day. He was disappointed, I think, that we hadn’t found either treasure or bones, but he did write about the urn.
Something had been walking over our spoil heaps overnight, no doubt digging for worms, probably badgers. Molly was uncharacteristically quiet, although she had been filled with laughter over parlour games with her friends and cousins the previous evening. Childish pastimes did not appeal to me, so I sat with Mrs Chorleigh who had joined us after dinner for half an hour. She was very thin and looked frail, but she asked after my mother and after a little while, she talked about Claire, her youngest child. A few tears flowed; she told me that while Mr Chorleigh did not like to talk about their daughter, she believed it did her good. She remembered stories of her three children, and I contrasted their childhood with my own, spent often in the woods around my mother’s birthplace of Derby and my great-uncle’s in Norfolk. I was able to mimic the local dialects of both, and she surprised me with her own very creditable impression of a rural Hampshire workman. That distracted the others from their games, and after Mrs Chorleigh retired Peter, Molly and I sat and talked until bedtime, a lovely evening.
At the barrows, I helped Peter pull off the excavation covers and the pot was even more remarkable in the morning light. Molly unfolded her stool and sat down to draw. ‘I’m going to get better measurements,’ she said, not looking at me. ‘It’s still not quite right.’
We uncovered the base of the pot very slowly, and despite our care, one crack opened up and pulled a wedge off the pot-shaped fill within.
‘It was bound to happen,’ I said to Peter. ‘It’s too heavy to support its own weight with the damage. Over millennia, water and frost will have fractured it.’
He lifted the triangle carefully and laid it on a cloth. ‘We’ll be able to reconstruct it anyway.’
Since it was no longer whole, we could dig away at the centre of the pot, hollowing it out. A few blackened fragments of something, perhaps bone, started to show in the soil. I collected them as I uncovered them, until I found a roundish object that looked like the head of a long bone.
‘Is it human?’ Peter was almost whispering, and I realised he was looking up at Molly.
I nodded my head. I could see Molly might get upset. ‘We should be able to get the whole thing out,’ I said in a low voice. ‘We’ll need some sort of glue if we want to reconstruct it.’
Molly folded her notebook open and showed me the sketch of the urn.
It was remarkable. She could be an artist if she chose, if she wasn’t so interested in history and science. We exclaimed over it until she blushed, then she put her pencils away and said she had to sit with her mother that afternoon. When she had gone, we pored over the blackened fragments, looking for recognisable bones.
The back of the pot yielded a handful of teeth: three incisors, one premolar and two molars that could only have come from the mouth of a human being. We were sombre, holding in our hands the essence of a man like ourselves, long dead, cremated then buried.
‘This is a secondary burial,’ Peter mused. ‘Which suggests there might be a primary burial under the slabs.’
‘Slabs which may need a gantry of some sort to get off the ground,’ I reminded him. ‘Perhaps we can rig up some block and tackle arrangement if we can find trees big enough.’
He brushed away at the inside of the pot, added a broken piece of bone to the pile. ‘I’ll ask at the yacht club,’ he said. ‘They have all sorts of lifting equipment down there. We used to watch them take the boats out of the water at the end of the season.’
‘We?’ I was staring at the new fragment with my eyeglass, looking for enamel that would verify it as a tooth. I found a sliver of shiny orange surface that confirmed it.
‘Me and Claire and Molly.’ Something in his voice made me look up. ‘Are you getting fond of Molly, Ed?’ He sounded so awkward.
‘What?’ I caught his meaning. ‘No. I mean I like her enormously, she’s just the sort of girl one would like as a sister. Or a friend.’
He grinned at me. ‘That’s good to know. I mean, she’s the best sister a chap could have, but I don’t want you getting distracted.’
I wondered then if he was warning me off. I turn
ed back to my burned bones, and he took up his brush and trowel. I suppose I would be a very poor match for Miss Chorleigh of Chorleigh House, when all I have to offer is my scholarship and willingness to work.
‘I’ll box these up,’ I said, my voice somewhat cool. ‘I think the professor should see them, what do you think?’
‘I think that’s a splendid idea.’ He shuffled over to where I was sitting on the grass. ‘Don’t think I meant anything by it, I know you’re the best of fellows. But Molly is sensitive. I wouldn’t like her to get a crush on a chap.’
I laughed at that. ‘I should think not.’
‘And Molly is so young, and impressionable. And you’re a good-looking fellow. I just don’t want—’
‘I understand.’
He slipped an arm around my shoulder. ‘I knew you would.’ He hugged me for a second. ‘Let’s sort out the last of these burnt bits.’
I hope he doesn’t see the hurt his words have caused. I wouldn’t have him distressed for the world.
* * *
Letter to Professor Robert Conway, Balliol College, Oxford, 1st July 1913
Dear Professor,
We have excavated the west end of the barrow to a depth of three feet eight inches, sieving out several dozen small fragments of pottery and a number of sharp flint shapes. I enclose a sketch of a buried pot, complete and in situ at the western end of the centre of the barrow, adjacent to two fitted slabs of limestone that appear to overlay a void. These stones are raised on an edge of vertical slabs each varying from eighteen to twenty-one inches in height. The pot, when excavated, was found to contain a number of small, burned fragments of bone, a large femur, head much charred, and some teeth (sample enclosed). I would welcome your insights into the finds.
Yours gratefully,
E. Masters
13
Thursday 21st March, this year
Chorleigh House, Fairfield, New Forest
Sage spent the next morning working under the direction of the senior scene of crime officer. He was a quiet man who had given Sage the slabs of turf cut from the grave the day before to lay out on a long table under an awning on the lawn. Now Sage could catalogue and preserve finds to be examined in the lab. She looked briefly for obvious fibres, blood, anything anomalous, viewing through different light sources and using a binocular viewer that magnified all the bugs, making them look like they were reaching for her. One particularly large centipede raced over her hand, making her leap up and swear. She pressed her hand over her heart as it thudded, and the creature disappeared under another piece of turf.
She decided it was time for a break and stepped away. In her bag was a flask of coffee she had brought from home. She poured herself a drink and sipped, balanced the mug on the very edge of the table. She dialled her mother’s number on the one bar of signal she had.
‘Sheshe?’ Sage could already picture her smiling down the phone.
‘Sage. You all right?’
Sage could hear Max banging something in the background. ‘How’s Maxie? Is he being good?’
‘He’s being baby, always good. He’s playing with wooden spoons, like you did when you were little.’ She laughed at something Max was doing and Sage’s heart leapt. She had been teaching part-time as well as studying courses at home, and had become used to more time around the baby. ‘How’s Nick?’ her mother asked. ‘You did talk to him? You went so early this morning.’
Nick. ‘Oh, he’s fine.’ Even Sage could hear the evasiveness in her voice. ‘I haven’t had much time to speak to him, he wasn’t answering when I got back and then I fell asleep with the baby.’
‘But how did big interview go? He’s coming back now, yes?’ The signal was fading in and out.
Big interview? Sage didn’t want to ask; he’d talked about a team ministry, whatever that was. ‘He said a few days. We’ll talk about it when I get back,’ Sage said. ‘I was just missing Maxie. They’ve got me sorting through about a hundred clods of earth full of spiders and bugs.’
‘Call Nick.’
Standing back from the table she saw something she must have missed earlier. A flash of white. ‘I will, I promise. Sheshe, I’m sorry, I have to go.’
She rang off and walked over to where she’d seen the – something. Close up there was nothing so she tried lighting from the side. There, a tiny rectangle of something under a blade of grass. It was a translucent speck that caught the light, a few millimetres wide and a little longer. She retrieved it with forceps and put it in an evidence vial. ‘Martin?’
The senior SOCO had been working on the grave, and emerged from the tent with an expression of relief. With the sun out the tent must have been getting hot. ‘Found something?’
She mutely offered him the specimen. ‘Just this, so far. I almost missed it.’
‘Could it have come from your forensic suit?’
Sage looked down at her plasticised paper coverall. ‘I suppose it could be. But I think it’s more transparent. That’s why I almost missed it.’
He held it up to the light. ‘It looks like trimmed-off plastic waste from some sort of manufacturing process. Did you document its location?’
‘Of course. TRM-133-148. Just at the base of a blade of grass in the section of turf 133 that was piled up.’
‘It’s contemporary with the burial.’ He smiled. ‘Good catch. I was talking to Trent yesterday about the barrows.’
She grinned back at him. ‘They are fascinating. More my usual job, to be honest.’
‘He said they had been dug up a few times?’
‘The big barrow was excavated in the early nineteen hundreds. But Trent showed me LiDAR scans showing the features in more detail, with several other indentations and ridges associated with the site. I thought we might ask the landowner if we can explore in the soft ground at the end of the smaller feature, that boggy area, there might be something there. In the future, obviously.’ She sipped the coffee. It was cooling rapidly in the slight breeze. ‘It’s well documented but hasn’t been properly surveyed or excavated.’ She waved at Trent, walking towards them from the road. ‘Trent, we found something.’
Trent walked over, and had a look at the plastic sample. ‘Good work. Can I borrow Sage, Martin? I’ve thought of something about the barrows.’
Sage put her tools down, stripped off her gloves and forensic suit and followed Trent down the path. ‘How’s the other case?’
‘Can’t get on it. The sleeping bag remains are at the mortuary so I had a look at the site here,’ he said. ‘Much of the area around the barrows would be hard to dig for a burial, it’s full of roots and stone.’
‘So?’
‘In 1992 Lara Black disappeared here,’ Trent said, looking around. ‘Where would you bury her?’
‘I suppose in the garden, in the flower beds or under the grass where the soil is easier to dig. The police must have searched back then; even if they didn’t have much time, they would have noticed recent digging. And she could be somewhere in the forest.’
Trent shrugged. ‘If I was trying to conceal a body, I would have avoided anywhere where dog walkers go. This isall private land. I just wish they had been able to look more carefully at the time, but Mr Chorleigh senior had very good lawyers and was a forest official.’
She thought about it. ‘Forensics would be able to tell us much more now.’
‘Thermal imaging, DNA, microfibers, so many things we didn’t – or couldn’t – identify back then. They didn’t even run a metal detector over the grounds or get permission to bring in dogs.’ He pointed at the barrows. ‘How about in the barrows themselves? You could put someone in there and no one would know.’
Sage looked at the long mound stretching along the field boundary. ‘The soil would be easier to dig. But they had gardeners working here; they would have noticed the grass and soil had been disturbed.’ She thought back over what she knew. ‘The Chorleighs fired one of them around that time. The police must have questioned them.’
‘The thing is, no one can dig up an ancient monument without a dozen permissions. I doubt if even the gardeners worked up here. If someone dug into the barrow itself and replaced the turf, who would know?’
‘So you think we should widen the search for Lara to the barrows?’
‘And then the whole New Forest? No. But I could make a case for examining the grounds in more detail, and maybe you and I can have a good look at the barrow along the way. Bonus.’
Sage shaded her eyes to look into the bright spot behind the clouds, starting to break through. ‘What about the stable floor? I thought you wanted to get on with that soon.’
Trent shook his head. ‘It’s going to have to wait. I need to get back to the lab. A cold case where there may not be a murder isn’t a priority when we have a body in Southampton and one here. I just came to check up on you and look at the grounds.’
Sage nodded. ‘I’ll finish bagging the turf and we should have enough to add the evidence to our report about the actual grave.’
‘You talked to the pathologist about the body. Any thoughts?’
‘She said River was left lying on her side on a hard surface after her death, with her arm underneath her,’ Sage said. ‘She suggests a time of death on Saturday evening. She wasn’t killed where she was found, there’s no blood evidence around the site.’
‘Odd. They kill her somewhere, then risk being seen driving out here, park somewhere on the verge, carry her into the grounds, dig a shallow grave and cover her with leaves from the woodland – from a stable you can’t see from the road.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t make much sense, unless they knew the property very well. Which does suggest Chorleigh. Maybe he thought the grave would be deep enough – out of sight, out of mind.’
‘According to the DCI, everyone from around here thinks Alistair Chorleigh killed Lara and got away with it,’ Trent said. ‘But Lenham’s looking into records of people who knew the property – the local farmer, builders and gardeners who knew about the stable, widening the inquiry.’
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